


Where You Hang Your Heart

by suitesamba



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Aging, Angst, Canon through season 4, First Kiss, First Time, Injury, M/M, Post Season 4, That cottage in Sussex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-01
Updated: 2017-03-01
Packaged: 2018-09-27 15:23:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10028024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitesamba/pseuds/suitesamba
Summary: Part 1 - Sherlock (The Walking Man)Part 2 - John (The Waiting Game)When it was all over, when the east wind had blown through and they’d picked themselves off the pavement, Sherlock said enough.When it was all over, when Mary was dead and Rosie didn’t have enough family left for John to risk even an adrenaline high, John watched Sherlock go.Eighteen years later, the real journey begins.





	1. Part 1 - Sherlock (The Walking Man)

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Where You Hang Your Heart | 此心安处](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10296320) by [yikshuontheroad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yikshuontheroad/pseuds/yikshuontheroad)



> Listen to [Where You Hang Your Heart](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10248341/chapters/22724447) as a podfic created by [bagofthumbs](http://archiveofourown.org/users/bagofthumbs/pseuds/bagofthumbs)
> 
> Chapter 1 of _Where You Hang Your Heart_ is the already-published “The Walking Man,” which tells the story from Sherlock’s point of view. If you’ve already read it, you can start with Chapter 2. Chapter 2 is the new “The Waiting Game,” which tells the story, in more detail, from John’s point of view, and in one chapter, from Rosie’s. Despite Rosie's part in the story, this isn't traditional parentlock.
> 
> Chapter 2 was written for bakerstmel (Callie4180 on AO3), who won my services in the Fandom Trumps Hate Auction. It was the greatest of pleasures to work with Mel - what author wouldn’t dream of a giftee who just wanted our boys to be together and who is already a fan of your work? And since one of her suggestions was a retelling of “The Walking Man” from John’s POV, she knew there would be a happy ending. Mel - thank you for inspiring me to continue this story line and for your encouraging words throughout. I’ve loved getting to know you through this auction.
> 
> I also won the services of a beta in the Fandom Trumps Hate auction, so thanks to bennettmp339 for helping to pull Chapter 2 into shape. I appreciate each of your suggestions, because choosing the right word, the right turn of phrase, is incredibly important in a vignette-style story such as this one. Your thoughtful consideration of my story and my words is very much appreciated. Thank you! And thanks, as always, to my badgerlady, who did a final proofread looking for those errant commas.

In the end, when the work is done, when there is nothing left to prove, and no one who cares to remember, there is still life to be lived.

The words he spoke that day, rising above the blood pounding in his veins, soaring above the roar of the east wind in his ears, are alive in no one’s memory but his own. True words. Heartfelt words. The truest, bravest words he has ever uttered. 

Words he has lived by for eighteen years now. 

_Your own death is something that happens to everybody else. Your life is not your own._

When they were chewed up, and spat out on the ground, mangled remnants of broken men, held together only with grit and guts and bygone glory, Sherlock said _no more._

He’d walked away from London, from 221B, from cases, from his brilliant accomplishments, his horrific failures. Bodies on the pavement, in the morgue, on desert sand, in littered allies. Blood on his shoes, his face. Blood on his hands. Blood oozing from his shattered chest, her mangled gut. Metaphoric. Real. Under his nails. Staining his skin.

Perhaps he hides, or perhaps he waits. He’s taken a cottage in Sussex, and he is not short of visitors, some that drop in for a romp through the mind palace, and others who bring tea and biscuits or deliveries from town. He lives alone, as he must. It’s for the best. A necessity, not a choice.

Rebuilt on the same chassis, he is a reimagined update of a failed design. 

He indulges in an occasional cigarette, but he’s been otherwise clean all these years. It is easier here, away from the bustle of London, easier in his new profession, easier because he has solved the final problem, and knows at last to whom his life belongs.

The game is on, and it is a frustrating game, and a long one, this waiting game.

And while he lives by himself, he is not a lonely man.

There is the work. He is solving riddles still, putting together pieces of trails long grown cold. He’d walked into a meeting of the Sussex Archaeological Society on a lark, and fallen into a field of forensics he’d never even imagined. The coldest of cold cases. Mysteries long buried. Intrigue without danger, but no less fascinating. And time – always enough time to solve because no one is balancing on a knife’s edge, slipping away in a hospital bed, stepping in front of an assassin’s bullet.

There are the visits to London for case research at the British Museum, the London Library. Meetings with Lestrade – official consultations for which Sherlock is paid a standard fee. Meetings which never leave Lestrade’s office. 

And there is John.

Seventeen stair steps up to John’s door where Sherlock is always welcome, where the tea is ambrosia and his chair cradles him and there is a Sherlock-shaped depression on the sofa not allowed to grow too cold too long. 

John and his daughter, and John’s job in the A&E at Bart’s. John at 221B, watching over a surprisingly spry Mrs. Hudson. Demons dead, his trigger finger no longer itches. He is free to be the man he wants to be. A physician. A father. A friend. Like Sherlock, he’s been leveled and reborn, stripped to bone, remade, reimagined.

He joins Sherlock at times, in Lestrade’s cramped office, and receives his own consulting fee, and they all walk to a pub together after. There is no hat, no coat, no cane, no gun. John couldn’t climb a fire escape if his life depended on it these days, and Sherlock, who once knew the back alleys of London like the veins in the crook of his arm, is now more in tune with the flight patterns of the bees that visit his garden.

They grow, together and apart, but they are barely out of adolescence, though John has raised a child, has taken her on play dates and hosted sleepovers and, on one recent, notable occasion, begged Sherlock to investigate a particularly suspicious boyfriend who turns out to be as ordinary and white bread as he appears on the surface. Sherlock, too, is settling into his skin, this new skin. The skin that doesn’t prickle with need, but that still burns. A slow burn, a consistent fire, banked, contained. An ember saved to be carried and nurtured and tended until the next camp is reached, the next milestone on the journey.

While John is raising his daughter, who has entered those difficult teen years, and attending to the business of watching rather helplessly as she moulds herself – his wishes and hopes to the contrary be damned – into a curious amalgamation of the best and worst of both her parents, Sherlock discovers walking. 

He’s been walking for quite a few years already, of course, but only as a necessary means of locomotion, with the goal of transporting the transport when other modes are illogical or unavailable. 

But suddenly – brilliantly, beautifully, amazingly – he is walking because he loves to walk.

He seldom has anywhere he has to be, though as he walks, he discovers places to hold his attention for hours or days or weeks. He stops to pick apart lichen and moss, to poke his finger into rotting stumps to catalogue the punk, to sort through stones at the ocean’s edge. He sleeps in rooms above pubs, pubs with names like The King of Prussia and Ye Dolphin and The Hairy Dog. Names that, in another day, John might have borrowed for cases in his blog. He eats when he’s hungry, and goes through a dozen pair of shoes, and there is stubble on his face and a sea wind at his back.

Britain is made for walking, and Sherlock walks all the famous footpaths, and all the not-so-famous ones, and oftentimes he strays off path and wanders through places he has no business being. He walks to Winchester from Eastbourne, from Dover to Farnham, the Anglesey Coast Path. To Portpatrick on the Southern Upward Way. One late spring day, four years, five, after he began to walk, he leaves his home, starts up the path to town, and turns up, some days later, on the outskirts of London.

Mrs. Hudson’s niece has moved in to help care for her, Rosie has gone off to uni, and the wind is from the west.

It is a good omen.

He takes his time, breathing in London as he traverses familiar paths. He won’t linger long. Either it is time, or it isn’t. 

Mrs. Hudson kisses his cheeks, runs her gnarled hand over his stubbled face. 

“I think of you every day,” he acknowledges as he studies her face, sees the truth in her eyes.

“I know you do, Sherlock. I know.”

John smiles when he sees him. John doesn’t know his hair is too long, that he’s missed a spot shaving. That his eyes are the same blue.

John, it turns out, thinks it is lovely weather for a walk.

They go down the stairs together, but John stops with a frown, and goes back up for something forgotten. Sherlock waits for him outside– five minutes, ten. His heart beats large in a chest too small, and he stoops to retie his shoes, pauses to watch a cabbie argue with a cop. It holds his interest, and he works it all out in a minute’s time, but it doesn’t distract him from the matter at hand. 

Walking does that to a man, he’s found. Clears the mind. Sharpens focus. He’s emptied the Mind Palace of a decade of flotsam and jetsam. His head feels lighter, his heart fuller, and his feet have wings.

He leans against the wall, takes out a cigarette from a tightly wrapped pack, and lights it. He inhales deeply, and closes his eyes to think.

He gets only the single drag, because John plucks the fag from his hand and crushes it out against the bricks.

He is carrying a backpack now, and a bottle of water. He’s changed into sturdy trainers, and has an odd, determined look on his face. He turns and locks the door, and glances up at the sky. 

“Umbrella?” he says, with a small frown, and a glance at the door behind them.

Sherlock raises his eyes to the cloudless sky and shakes his head. There’s no sign of rain, and he’s spent so many years living in the present day that he can hardly think ahead to tomorrow.

“Alright then.”

John shoulders the backpack, and they walk away together. Cabs approach and slip away, and they walk past bus stops and tube stations. An occasional, innocuous black car zips by in a blur.

Conversation is easy when the walls aren’t closing in, when your next step is not over a precipice, when the burn under your skin has finally faded into a bearable tightness, like skin pulled too taut after hours in the sun.

And at the end of the day, there’s a pub, with fish and chips and a pint for each. There’s a room over the pub with two beds and a shared bath, a window facing west, soft pillows and warm quilts. Two toothbrushes, two pair of reading glasses, two wallets, and a set of keys that John won’t be using for a very long time.

John groans as he settles on his back, stretching out his legs while Sherlock examines John’s shoes and adjusts the laces and frowns at the insoles. He lines up the shoes beside his own, on the floor beneath the window, and stares at them with their west-pointing toes, then back at John, stretched out on one side of the narrow bed.

He sits carefully on the end of the bed, back to John, and tentatively lowers a hand until it rests on John’s foot, fingers wrapping around to the arch, pressing up until John sighs and flexes his toes.

Sherlock pulls a knee up and turns halfway, looking over his shoulder to see a man he doesn’t know, boneless, blissful, eyes closed, cares left behind on the doorstep.

He imagines that, for John, this is a most unexpected journey.

It is a rebirth, a day they’ll always mark, a birthday of sorts, a death and a resurrection. They’re snakes who shed their skin, chameleons who try on many colours, and they’ve come to this point along paths that diverge, and cross, and sometimes collide.

But now they’ll walk together.

There’s an empty bed in the morning, and a single bare foot outside the cover at the end of the other. Sherlock wakes first, and pulls in his cold foot, blinking against the morning light, thinking of tea.

His mobile beeps, and he reaches over John, fumbling for his glasses. He doesn’t need them to know what the message says. He reads it though, because Mrs. Hudson, on into her nineties, still sends it to him every day, because all those years ago, he asked her to, and has never told her to stop.

But today – ah, today he reads something quite different.

_Not all those who wander are lost._

“What’s that?” John’s voice is morning rough, and he squints, looking at the unfamiliar picture of Sherlock with reading glasses perched on his nose.

“A message from Mrs. Hudson,” he says, dropping the mobile on the bed and folding up the glasses. “She’s undoubtedly quoting something I should know, but I don’t. Tea?”

John turns onto his side and smiles. “Only if you’re making it.”

Sherlock rises to turn on the kettle, and watches as John carelessly picks up his mobile, and thumbs it open. “You don’t mind?” he asks.

Sherlock shrugs. He doesn’t mind. He wants tea. He wants this normal to be his forever normal. He wants John to use his mobile and climb over him in the morning to use the loo. He wants this life that is not his own to be John’s life – for John to _know_ this as irrevocably as he knows that his feet hurt and his hair has long turned grey.

He flips on the kettle and hears behind him John’s chuckle.

“God I love her,” John says and Sherlock turns to see his eyes crinkle with amusement, his mouth turn up whimsically at the corners. He shakes his head, rests the phone on his belly and closes his eyes.

And Sherlock knows there is a message here, that the words mean something more to John than their face value alone. That he’s heard them before, said them before, shared this _thing_ with Mrs. Hudson at least. 

He doesn’t know – cannot know – that John, too, has been waiting.

“Where are we heading?” John asks as he sips mediocre tea that is better than any he has ever had.

“Isle of Wight,” Sherlock answers. “Tennyson lived there once.”

“Queen Victoria,” John adds.

Sherlock looks blank, and John does not offer a history lesson, and as payment in kind, Sherlock, _this_ Sherlock, does not quote Tennyson.

_Twilight and evening bell,_  
_And after that the dark!_  
_And may there be no sadness of farewell,_  
_When I embark_  
-from _Crossing the Bar_ by Alfred Lord Tennyson


	2. Part 2 - John  (The Waiting Game)

ooOOOoo

Rosie Watson is walking. She’s strong-willed, single-minded, and the only thing in her sights today is the staircase leading up to 221B. Seventeen wooden stairs with sharp corners and inadequate rails. She bats at John’s hand as he tries to help, but he hovers over her, stance wide and arms splayed, as she hefts herself up with all of the grit, determination, and unerring steadiness of her father.

The door, newly hung, freshly painted, is open at the top but she plunks herself down on the landing, mission accomplished, and lets John lift her up into his arms and balance her on his hip.

Mrs. Hudson is in the kitchen, but she hurries out, arms outstretched for the baby, and Rosie obligingly stretches forward. John relinquishes his hold and Mrs. Hudson carries her over to the mantel and they make faces in the mirror as Rosie reaches for the skull – a different skull, surprising what one can acquire with a few connections these days.

Skull excepting, the flat is practically bare. The furniture – John’s furniture – will arrive on the van tomorrow.

Sherlock’s been here. He’s fairly established in the cottage now, and his visits to London are still frequent, but he’s found new purpose down south, crime solving without the adrenaline. Cold cases, long cold, hidden in archaeological ruins, buried beneath the ground for so long that no urgency remains. But today there’s a note on the refrigerator, stuck on beneath a magnet from the Chinese take-away down the street.

 _Angelo’s. 6:30. Mrs. Hudson has promised to watch Rosie if you don’t want to bring her along._.

John pockets the note. It’s not quite five, and Mrs. Hudson says they really must go upstairs to see the nursery. Rosie is game for more stairs and they repeat the cautious climb to John’s old bedroom. There’s a thick cream-coloured area rug down, and an untidy basket of toys, left here one by one on the visits they’ve made these past months as the restoration work progressed. And something new – something so amazing that John stops in the doorway and gapes. Colourful glass spheres, strung up on thin wire well out of reach. Planets and moons, beautifully spun, each a work of art, and John knows they must have cost a fortune.

Knows what they mean, as well.

A promise. A gift.

_I won’t forget you._

“Ba!”

Rosie stretches upward, dancing on her toes, fingers grasping at the air. John reaches up and spins the earth. Suns rise and set, day bleeds into night, and time passes.

ooOOOoo

The first time he visits Sherlock at the cottage, he and Rosie take the train down from London and Sherlock meets them at the station. Rosie is sleepy, and Sherlock takes her from John’s arms and fits her into the child safety seat, securing the buckle as if it’s a casual, oft-performed act.

It is not.

He means to go back that evening, but Sherlock has shown him round the town, and he’s met the constable and the barkeep, and the head librarian, and there is a mystery of sorts to work out – not life and death, but there is something between the librarian and the constable that isn’t romantic, and that even John deduces before Sherlock mentions it. They bring back take-away to the cottage as they suss out the puzzle – identical facial tics, similar eyes, a genetic connection neither is aware of – and Rosie falls asleep on the floor in an untidy pile of blanket and spilled rice, clutching the new honeybee plushie Sherlock produced from his coat pocket while they queued for dinner. John suspects the thing is a dog chew toy but if so, it’s probably quite durable. He’s not going to split hairs when it comes to gifts from Sherlock, thinking of all the time he’s spent lying on the plush area rug in the nursery while Rosie uses him as playground equipment, watching the planets slowly spin, casting glorious points of coloured light across the ecru walls.

They drink a bottle of wine, enough to make them sleepy, and Sherlock checks the morning trains. The sofa is comfortable and warm, and when Sherlock produces a cot mattress from a cupboard without a word of explanation, John takes it in stride and gratefully tucks the mattress in between sofa and coffee table.

He won’t visit the cottage often, but when he does, there will be a pillow and a warm blanket ready on the sofa, and the cot mattress for Rosie. Coffee in the morning, a banana and Cheerios for Rosie, and a quick ride to town for the eight o’clock train for London.

They both are surprised at how quickly Rosie outgrows the mattress, and measure the years gone by between them by how far her little feet extend beyond the end.

ooOOOoo

They never said they were retiring from working with the Yard, though the limits of their involvement are implied by the two-hour train trip for Sherlock to reach London, and John’s new job at Bart’s in the A&E.

And, of course, Rosie.

They’re willing to take on consulting work in the more traditional sense. If Greg is truly stumped, he’ll text Sherlock, and sometimes e-mail case notes and photographs. John is well aware that Sherlock vets these cases extremely carefully and that, when he asks John to visit Lestrade’s office with him, he’s not made that request on a whim.

If he involves John in the consulting, there are medical reasons, or similarities to cases in the past, or a military connection of some sort. There are never murdered wives, or children, or psychotic sisters, or repressed childhood memories. And always there is a cheque in the post for his time and expertise, and he deposits each and every one in a savings account with the clever name of “After.” After Mary, after Sherlock. After Euros, the well, the game, the final problem, the insanity that was his life – their lives.

He’ll spend it someday. He has enough for now – for his needs, and Rosie’s. He’ll use it after she’s grown and off to uni, or in her gap year. He has some ideas already, and they don’t involve Baker Street at all.

There are very clear moments in their lives together where an observer can draw a dividing line. A before and after, a turning point, a dramatic climax followed by a real-life denouement. The line, however, is a moving target – or had been, before Sherlock left London and Baker Street was rebuilt. For John, killing the cabbie came first. For Sherlock, it was the pool. These were followed by the rooftop of Bart’s, Sherlock’s return, the defused bomb in the carriage, John’s wedding, Mary’s bullet in Sherlock, Sherlock’s in Magnusson, Norbury's in Mary.

Two years passed between Sherlock’s feigned death and his return. It was an immensely long time to John, and he lived a lifetime in those dark, oppressive months.

Nearly everyone who knows John and Sherlock will draw the dividing line in their lives on the day Sherlock told John he was leaving London.

Nearly everyone is wrong.

The event is significant, the separation painful for both, necessary for each.

Sherlock is not Rosie’s father. He doesn’t treat her as his own and, when she sees him, she’ll toddle over to him and make friends as small children will. She’ll show him a toy, which he’ll admire, and try to borrow, and she’ll squeal and run to John, and repeat it all again. She’s comfortable with him, as she is with Mrs. Hudson, and Molly, and the other adults that pepper her life. He can change a nappy under duress, though he’s given up at getting her into shoes. He’s learned to push scraps of naan across the table to her when she’s fidgety and will even, on occasion, distract her with his car keys.

John is aware that Sherlock always keeps Rosie at this comfortable distance – familiar, friendly enough, but not intimate. He’s John’s friend, not hers. He doesn’t rush to the A&E when she needs stitches, doesn’t sit up with her at night when she’s feverish. If there’s a crayoned scribble stuck to his fridge, it’s one she made on one of their infrequent visits to Sussex, on the back of a placemat at the Indian restaurant in town. She was three years old, and she’d drawn him the solar system.

John knows what Sherlock is doing, and he cannot stop it.

He stays out of the news, avoids notoriety, fades into a quiet purgatory before his time, and allows her the kind of childhood she deserves.

He thinks this is the most selfless thing Sherlock has ever done, but he doesn’t know about another moment. A moment of profound clarity. A moment when Sherlock hurled a gun into a river and announced that his life was not his own.

It is a long sentence, a long sacrifice. Every time – every single time – that John folds up the blanket on the sofa after Sherlock has gone, he holds it against his face as he carries it to the cupboard, fleetingly immerses himself in Sherlock, and reminds himself to be patient. That there is a promise there somewhere, implied in the soft comfort of the rug in Rosie’s room, in the prisms of light that dance on her walls and ceilings, and especially – most especially – in the melancholic lullaby he plays those nights when the fire burns beneath his skin and he cannot sleep, cannot rest. It’s Sherlock, violin tucked under his chin, standing at the window of 221B so long ago, captured by John in a stolen moment in a sleepless night.

Sherlock has a different violin now, but he keeps it at the cottage, and plays only for the bees.

ooOOOoo

Most days are not a struggle.

The work at the A&E is perfect for him, a reformed adrenaline junkie, a little girl’s father whose mornings and evenings and weekends are filled with messy kisses and homework struggles, walks in the park and school activities. Greg and Mike try to set him up, and he’s asked out from time to time by a colleague at work or a mum at the park.

He doesn’t make excuses, a polite shake of his head, a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, and they glance at his hand, but he’s not wearing a ring.

Molly has gone and married, and has a small boy of her own named Henry. She has single friends, but she never asks John why he doesn’t date, and doesn’t ever matchmake.

Most days, life is full, and vibrant, and busy. Most weeks he hears from Sherlock. Most months, they see each other – a meeting at Lestrade’s and dinner following, an overnight on the sofa at 221B when Sherlock spends the day at the British Museum, an occasional visit to Sherlock’s parents’ with Rosie, whose family has never been defined by blood. She loves the rides in the black cars, and watches London slide by out the tinted windows while asking Sherlock all the questions she’s saved since last time he came around.

Some days, in those sometimes moments when Sherlock is especially quiet, or watches him, or Rosie, or both of them, for too long without comment, eyes serious and thoughtful, John wants to shake the quiet out of him. He wants him to rage against the world, against the trauma that reshaped his life. He wants him to spend hours in a therapist’s chair, staring at a benign face until it fades into rippled water, blurs into murky depths. He wants him to speak up, to demand his just reward. He doesn’t know this Sherlock, but he loves him all the same.

Mary was wrong. They aren’t the Baker Street boys. There’s something left to be done still, a life at stake. John doesn’t know what Sherlock told himself, told his sister, that fateful morning, but he understands that he is waiting, and he is careful – oh so careful – not to rock the boat.

He wonders what keeps Sherlock going, what keeps him alive. What is the drug fueling his psyche as he crawls on knees and elbows, chasing bees on clover? Does delving into mysteries of ancient Norse men dead beneath British soil quell the urge, the fire in his belly, the itch beneath his skin? What are his fixes, now? A breath or two of London? A night on John’s sofa?

Does he know that he sleeps like a baby at 221B, while John hardly sleeps at all, up ‘til all hours after Sherlock drops off to sleep, watching his chest rise and fall, allowing himself those stolen hours to want, to want so badly, then forcing himself to package it all away?

For now.

In all that time, in all those years, he asks of Sherlock only one thing. That he take care of Rosie if John dies before she’s grown, and that he watch over her if he dies after she’s on her own. And Sherlock agrees without fuss, though he regards John with unmasked concern, and John puts it in his will, and they never speak of it again.

ooOOOoo

Mycroft knows their secret.

It’s such a secret that Sherlock keeps it from John, and John from Sherlock.

John goes about his life for eighteen years as if there is no end game. He’s focused on the here, the now. His job – he’s merited two significant promotions in a dozen years – something that happens, apparently, when you actually show up for work and pay more attention to your patients than to the madman texting you during medical examinations. His daughter – she’s an odd blend of both of them, he realises, with a bit of Harry and Sherlock thrown in for good measure. His writing – a memoir of sorts, an homage to Sherlock that no one sees, or reads, besides himself. He goes out, sees friends, does the shopping for Mrs. Hudson, hosts sleep-overs and stays up, pacing, when Rosie is out with friends and the hour of curfew approaches.

Sherlock seldom gives him notice before he is there, knocking on the door, letting himself in if no one is home. But still, Mycroft often catches them here together.

He is not a sociable man, or a particularly kind one. After all these years, he is still alone, more alone than Sherlock, and he keeps what secrets he still holds close to the vest.

There is a time, just before Sherlock begins to walk, when Mycroft stops him as he leaves 221B. John is out, and Mrs. Hudson too – they’re out together, of course, he should have remembered the day – and he’s headed to Bart’s to see Molly, or perhaps to New Scotland Yard to visit Lestrade.

“Really, Sherlock, what are you waiting for? She’s almost fourteen – she’s practically grown. You’re not a target – you haven’t seen a body that’s been dead less than a thousand years since….”

Sherlock shoulders past him and raises his hand for a cab.

“I’ve got a car, Sherlock,” Mycroft calls out. “I’ll take you to Bart's.”

A cab pulls up – Sherlock still has that particular gift – and slides away with him.

Mycroft is still waiting by the door when John arrives, Rosie following holding the shopping bags in one hand and Mrs. Hudson’s arm in the other.

Mycroft helps Mrs. Hudson inside – he may not be nice, but he’s quite polite to Mrs. Hudson, no matter that she dislikes him intensely and hasn’t forgotten that and likely never will. Rosie is casually expectant, waiting for spectacular fireworks, though they seldom happen these days. She’s always been intrigued by Mycroft – she is as much the open book as her father, and just as loyal to her father as John is to Sherlock.

The girl runs upstairs with the bags once she sees that her father is relatively unperturbed and Mycroft quite attentive to Mrs. Hudson. Mycroft settles Mrs. Hudson in her chair and turns on the television, cranking the sound up even as he frowns at the intrusion of noise, and pressing the remote control into her hands.

“She’s nearly grown,” Mycroft says as he joins John at the bottom of the stairs.

“Not nearly,” John says, frowning at this unexpected topic. They don’t discuss his daughter. They just don’t. “She’s only thirteen.”

“She’ll be dating soon, I expect.”

John’s stance stiffens. He shakes his head and starts up the stairs. “Goodbye, Mycroft.”

“Hasn’t he’s waited long enough, John?”

Is he gratified that John pauses on the stair, turns his head back to gaze at him a moment with carefully blank face? Is it acknowledgment? Something more? Something less?

“Not your business, Mycroft.”

The military stiffness softens. John’s shoulders sag as he hurries up the stairs. An ordinary man wouldn’t have noticed, would have thought John Watson unfazed. Mycroft Holmes is no ordinary man. He’s been Sherlock’s brother all Sherlock’s life, and a Holmes all of his.

ooOOOoo

It threatens to fall apart, every last, painful, lonely moment, when John is attacked by the wife of a patient he’s working desperately to save. It’s random – he’s in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and she’s high as a kite as she stabs the knife into his already-damaged shoulder. She raises it again as the nurse dives at the woman’s arm and there’s a tussle as they all fall down together.

When he recalls that day, he remembers the exhilarating rush of adrenaline before he remembers the pain. He remembers the blood, and the crack of bone when he finally gets hold of the woman’s wrist with his right hand and twists it to free the knife.

He doesn’t remember struggling to his feet, then collapsing from the pain, or much more than a groggy moment while they worked on him in the A&E, then took him into surgery to repair the damage.

He remembers waking, rising out of a drug-dimmed sleep into a murky dusk, consciousness returning in gentle, rolling waves that leave him vaguely nauseated. His eyes and mouth are dry, his fingers stiff as he scrabbles for purchase on the rolling waves.

The earth settles, the fog begins to lift.

Something – someone – squeezes his right hand.

He considers this as he orients himself to the here and now and pieces together snapshots and three second video clips into a string of memories.

He knows where he is, and why he’s here, and he knows that Sherlock is sitting beside him, and Sherlock is holding his hand.

He doesn’t have to open his eyes to know this. The hand covering his own is large, the fingers long and calloused from violin and bow. Sherlock squeezes his hand again and John slowly moves his fingers to lace through Sherlock’s.

“Harry is your sister. Molly is Rosie’s godmother and lives in London. Mrs. Hudson loves you like a son. Lestrade is dependable, as is Stamford. You have new friends, too, and there is always Mycroft. Did you forget to tell me that in making me Rosie’s legal guardian, you also made me responsible for making medical decisions for you when you are indisposed?”

Sherlock is tired. He is not actually upset – there is an affectionate warmth in his voice that cannot be missed. John is just alert enough to wonder what complication arose that has brought Sherlock here from the south of England, to his bedside, holding his hand. What organ hit, nicked, destroyed or damaged. Kidney or liver, he thinks, remembering the scuffle before he was able to wrest the knife away.

He wiggles his other hand, pleased to note that he can move his fingers, with difficulty. The tape on the IV drip pulls as he moves. He tries shifting his hips, surprised that that part of his body, though stiff, seems otherwise uncompromised.

Sherlock releases his hand, perhaps self-conscious about the gesture now that John is awake. John opens his eyes and focuses on his friend’s face. Less than a day – little evidence of stubble, and he hasn’t been sleeping here, at least not by the evidence from his still pressed clothing.

“They had to remove scar tissue from the old wound,” he says, not bothering to explain how he’s managed to read John’s mind. “They offered to do a more extensive repair job, skin grafts and such.”

“Dr. Neel.” John’s throat protests the sound. Sherlock offers him water, and John sips through the straw until Sherlock pulls it gently away.

“Gifted plastic surgeon, and available. I said no. Anything they could do to make the injury less painful in hospital and long-term, and to keep your dexterity and range of motion, but that you didn’t care a whit about the scarring. You’d prefer to minimise your hospital stay and get home to your daughter.”

He tastes the relief, feels the weight of worry dissipate. Scar tissue – of course. It would have made repairing the damage more difficult – complicated the process. He’s going to look a right mess now, but it’s only a passing consideration. He wets his lips before he tries to speak again. “She’s been here?”

Sherlock shakes his head. “Not yet.” He smiles, shakes his head again, still disbelieving. “Fourteen years old and she’s never seen her dad in hospital.”

They stare at each other without speaking, and there is wordless acknowledgment of what lies beneath, what both have done, but neither has said, for fourteen years.

“She’ll be grown soon.”

Mycroft Holmes is not allowed to remind John Watson of this.

Sherlock is.

It means _I’m waiting._ It means _I’m watching._ It means _I understand, I acknowledge._

I can do this.

“Bring her tomorrow, then,” John murmurs. “She’s old enough now.”

He doesn’t ask what they’ve told her, and he doesn’t expend the energy to fret. He’s chosen his friends well, his confidantes. He trusts them to tell her enough, but not to burden her with details she doesn’t need to know. He closes his eyes – all the important questions have been answered. His faith in Sherlock proven, with a test he’d never have devised himself.

Rosie Watson has lived her entire life and has never seen her dad in hospital.

ooOOOoo

Rosie Watson has lived her entire life and has never seen her dad in hospital

Until today.

They’ve taken one of Mycroft’s cars, and Sherlock is quiet in the seat beside her, pulling at the fabric of his trousers to smooth out wrinkles that aren’t even there. She’s not spent any time at all with him without her father there too, and she’s not quite sure what to say or do. She’s been to the hospital plenty of times – her dad works there, after all, and Mrs. Hudson has had two new hips, and she went with Dad to see Molly and her baby.

She slept all right last night. Sherlock stayed, and he’d made an omelet for breakfast, and lots of toast – how much toast did he think one person could eat? - though he hadn’t had any himself. He’d watched her while she ate, though, though he pretended to be reading the paper, and all of a sudden, out of the blue, he’d said “You’ve got your mother’s smile.”

She hadn’t thought she’d been smiling, even, but she smiles now, and he smiles too, one of those smiles that has a lot behind it, buried within the eyes, that you can’t quite make out. She wants to ask him some things, since her dad isn’t here, and she doesn’t think Sherlock will be as quick as her dad is to close down and deflect. She may never have this kind of chance again.

“Dad doesn’t talk about her much,” she says. She tries to keep her voice neutral – testing the waters.

He’s been drinking his tea, and she sees his discomfort in the barest hesitation, the smallest pause, as if he’d momentarily forgotten whether he was lifting the cup or setting it down.

“It’s painful,” Sherlock says, his words just as careful as hers had been.

She bites her bottom lip, wondering how far she can take this – how far she _should_. The way he’d said that. _It’s painful._ Not _It’s painful for_ him.

“I’ve pictures,” she says. She wishes she didn’t sound so defiant, but that’s what happens when she’s nervous or scared. And she’s both now, with her dad in hospital and Sherlock here making too much toast. “She wasn’t very pretty, was she?”

It’s a challenge, and he seems to recognise it as such. Sherlock’s regards her for several long seconds. She thinks he has the most interesting eyes, though she can’t read them now. She never can.

“No, not very. But beauty is extremely overrated. Your mother – your mother was talented, and funny, and extremely – extremely clever.”

“And nice?”

His mouth gives a little twitch and Rosie thinks he is going to laugh.

“No. Not very nice at all.”

“Is nice overrated too, then?” she asks, quirking an eyebrow the way she always does with her dad to let him know she’s being particularly clever.

“Sometimes,” he says after a bit of a pause. “And uninteresting.”

She watches his face carefully. Despite how intently he’d studied her before he spoke, he doesn’t quite look her in the eye as he answers her, and she has the idea he hasn’t thought about her mother in a very, very long time. She’s certain he has more to say – more he could say – but he’s holding himself back, though now he’s looking at her again – no, more like studying her. As if he knows exactly what she’s thinking – what her next question might be. She’s done a bit of snooping and found some surprising things. She knows how very clever Sherlock Holmes is, though she’s never seen that side of him when he’s here at 221B. When he visits here, he usually turns up on the sofa when she wakes up in the morning. She hardly ever sees him arrive. Her dad treats him like someone who’s always there, pushing a mug of tea at him across the coffee table, picking up a loose sock and lobbing it at him from across the room.

His voice drops so that she has to be very quiet to hear him, and it’s important that she hear every word. She wants very much to know the secrets no one acknowledges. And somehow, he _does_ know her questions – has guessed what she wants to know the most, and has deduced how she’s found the bits she already knows.

“I know what you’re wondering. I know what you’d like to know. And I know you’d never ask your dad, so go on then.” He looks her in the eye, daring her, reminding her that she’s quite brave already. “Ask me.”

She stares at him and she hates the tickle behind her eyes, and she detests the tear that tries to escape and make its way down her cheek. She blinks, and tries to find her voice. Swallows.

Sherlock takes pity. His voice is strange – there’s an edge on it, an edge of emotion she’s not used to hearing in his words.

“Yes, Rosie. I was there. At the end. You already know that. It was as horrible as you might imagine. One of the worst days in my life. I understand that you’re curious. You’ve read about it, haven’t you? You’ve looked up the newspaper accounts – and you know more.” He looks her right in the eye again, and she hastily glances away, swallowing back the secret. “You know something similar happened to me once.”

She reddens, but she’s already betrayed herself.

“You’ve found your father’s blog.”

It lies there between them, this conclusion, this deduction.

No matter how much he went on about it after it happened, the details in her dad’s old blog of Sherlock getting shot are sketchy at best. But they’re there, even though there’s virtually no mention of her mum at all.

“He doesn’t talk about my mum. He talks about you.” She toys with her toast. She’s not complaining. She’s not. She just doesn’t…understand.

Sherlock folds his hands in front of his face, steepling his fingers and resting his chin on his thumbs. She’s seen him do this before, just a few months ago, while he and Dad were working on some sort of puzzle after she’d gone to bed. She’d come down to use the bathroom and they’d been bent over on the same side of the kitchen table, note cards spread out in front of them. Sherlock was sitting, her dad leaning over his shoulder, pushing a card into a new position as Sherlock stared at them.

“The blog was about me – about the cases I solved, often with your father’s help. If you’ve read the blog, you know that already. Once your dad met your mother, he didn’t spend quite as much time writing.” He gives her a smile that is the kind that should be accompanied by a wink, but it’s not. It’s actually rather sad, and it puzzles her.

She swallows again. She’s trying to get up the courage to ask him what her heart wants so much to know.

And he understands. She watches him watch her, watches his face set into a peculiar frown, watches him blink, and swallow.

He reaches across the table and lays his hand over hers.

“He tried just as hard to save your mum as he did to save me,” he says, quietly, seriously. “It’s not fair, and it doesn’t make sense. And I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” she whispers.

They sit there for some time, and he squeezes her hand, and stands, and tells her to get ready to go, and now they’re in the car, and she knows they’re close to the hospital. The car is turning on the last street, and Sherlock’s voice interrupts her quiet thoughts.

“Your father deleted that blog,” he says. “How did you find it?”

She smiles. She’s nervous about seeing her dad in hospital. She doesn’t want to tell him about her friend Marilee, whose mum used to be a fan of Sherlock. Marilee’s mum printed out the entire thing, whenever her dad had posted something new. Not all the comments, and those were the most interesting part of the whole thing, really.

“Let’s not tell your dad right now, then, alright?” Sherlock says as the car stops. He gets out, waits for her to follow, and closes the door behind her. “But I think you should tell him – when he’s home and feeling better and you’re back to normal again. He should know you have questions. You’re old enough now.”

He doesn’t take her hand as they walk inside, but he stays just beside her and, when they reach her dad’s room, he steps back and lets her go in. John’s face holds a relieved smile, one that reaches his eyes and bleeds into her heart, and she forgets all about Sherlock for a while. Her dad acts almost ordinary, despite the drip in his hand, the ugly hospital clothes and the bandages and bruises. She wants an explanation of what happened – in his words, and he’d best not hold anything back. She is testing him, holding up his story against what Molly told her. Molly, who’d been waiting for her at Mrs. Hudson’s, front door open to catch her when she hurried in from school. Molly, who’d let little Henry run out to her, and climb into her lap as she sank down onto the stairs. Molly, who’d told her that John would be perfectly fine – that Sherlock had come up from Sussex already, and was taking care of things at the hospital.

Molly, who’d assured her that things like this didn’t happen for any reason at all. They just happened sometimes, and weren’t likely to happen again. That John would be fine. That he’d had worse – in the war – and of course she knew that already. But her dad didn’t talk much about the war, or about how he used to solve cases with Sherlock Holmes, or about the woman who’d been her mother once upon a time.

Molly who didn’t know that Rosie Watson knew a bit more about her dad’s life with Sherlock than anyone realised.

She steps back from her dad’s side when a doctor comes in to make very sure her dad doesn’t want surgery to minimise the scarring, and she frowns at that, but her dad gives her one of his “I’ll explain later” looks. Her gaze wanders about the room, stopping at the door where Sherlock is waiting. He’s staring at her dad, but doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to the conversation. He’s staring at him with an open, unguarded look, and she knows he was watching them together, but now he’s just watching her dad.

She doesn’t know what it means. She wonders if Sherlock is envious of them, if he wishes he had a child of his own, someone to keep him company, to keep him young.

She doesn’t know what that look means, but she absorbs its intensity, and she thinks that one day, she’d very much like someone to look at her that way too.

ooOOOoo

That Sherlock begins to walk just after John’s attack is no coincidence.

John is home, though not yet back at work. He’s going to physio three times a week and dutifully doing all his exercises at home. There’s pain, but he’s getting strength and flexibility back in his dominant hand and arm, and he’s been assured they’ll be no residual damage or loss if he continues with the exercises. He’s doing better than that – he’s using the gym at work now to improve his overall strength and flexibility. It feels good to be able to move. He’s watching less television, and has begun to go along with Rosie on Saturdays when she helps coach a team of five-year-old footballers.

Two months after the attack, he’s been back at work for a couple weeks, and he hasn’t seen Sherlock in four. He’s had a text or two, Sherlock checking in as Sherlock does.

_Molly thinks you’re overdoing it. Reminded her you’re a grown-up. – SH_

_You’re not overdoing it, are you? – SH_

And then –

_Take care of yourself John. – SH_

He’s getting dinner ready, waiting for Rosie to get home from her study group, and he stares at the message.

It sounds like a goodbye.

He frowns, drops the spoon he is holding and it clatters and spatters into the sink. He hurriedly types out a reply.

_I will if you will._

Sherlock replies within minutes – but they are long minutes, and John turns off the burner under the pasta sauce and carries the mobile into the living room where he sinks into his chair. The phone’s vibration is a breath of relief.

_I will. – SH_

It’s as much of a promise as he’s going to get, and he settles for it. Sherlock has slipped into maudlin moods in the past.

This, too, will pass.

A week passes. He and Rosie have dinner with Harry and her new wife – they’ve been married nearly half a year and things are going surprisingly well. Mrs. Hudson cuts her hand on a kitchen knife and Rosie shows up with her in the A&E on a weeknight when he’s covering a shift during a flu epidemic that’s taken out a number of the hospital staff. Rosie spends Saturday night at Molly’s – she watches Henry while Molly and her husband are out and stays over– and John has a rare night of too many pints with Greg,

He wakes to a headache and an over-dry mouth. He still has a couple hours before Molly brings Rosie home, so he eyes the post he’d dropped on the table on Friday and thumbs through it as he waits for the kettle to boil.

A flash of colour catches his eyes.

A picture postcard

Blue-bottomed fishing boats, an orange dinghy, sailboats with red-and yellow-striped sails. The sun bouncing off the water. A picture of quaint serenity.

Curious, he turns the card over. His address, 221B Baker St, in Sherlock’s careful hand. Stamp affixed squarely in the corner. He squints to read the postmark – Mousehole.

_Found myself in St. Ives on a case and clues led me to Mousehole. How did I not know one could walk here? – SH_

Scribbled along the lower edge of the card was another cramped line - _Need better shoes and a waterproof coat. – SH_

He stares at the card, turns it over to look at the front again, then pulls his laptop across the table and does a quick map search. The towns are not that far apart – ten miles as the crow flies. He zooms out, lips curling into a fond smile as he follows the thin, wavering line of a walking path around the peninsula, past Lands End, to the curious little dot labeled Mousehole, just south of Penzance. He imagines the sea, riotous waves pounding the cliffs. He can almost taste the salty bite of the wind, feel the ocean spray upon his pale London skin.

For a moment, fleeting but fierce, he thinks of Sherlock standing on the precipice, on the rooftop of Bart’s, Belstaff whipping about his legs.

He had a sneaking suspicion Sherlock had walked a fair bit more than ten miles.

He sees Sherlock again twelve weeks and five postcards later. Castles, and sea towns, and archaeological sites. Digs and artifacts, sunken ships and cemeteries. Sherlock has discovered that walking isn’t really about the destination at all, but about the discoveries made along the way.

He’s Sherlock still, but different. Nearly the same, but not quite. Like a cake made with an extra egg, or tea steeped too long. He’s everything he was before but a bit _more_ \- more intense, more quiet, more sturdy. He appears at the door at nine in the evening, hair too long, face more tan than John has ever seen it. He looks – good. Hale and hearty. He’s brought his violin – to be tuned, he says, and restrung - in the morning, when the shop is open.

John knows there are other plans for the violin, plans involving Eurus. After all these years, he hasn’t reconciled his mind with the idea of the woman who is Sherlock’s sister. He has a sister of his own, and it is often overwhelming to deal with her problems, her needs, the damage she has wrought. Holding them side by side, the comparison is laughable at best. If Eurus is the East wind, then Harry is the sting of the gentle breeze on a warm summer evening.

Sherlock plays that night, soft and low, standing by the window with John behind him and London before him. John reads in his chair, but the book is only a prop. He is listening, absorbing the music, and he hears the change, and knows Euros will, too.

This worries him but he lets it go. There are parts of Sherlock, pieces of him, that John believes he cannot touch.

The music is deeper, more soulful, less frenzied. The manic notes John is so accustomed to hearing as Sherlock works out his tension are gone altogether. It hasn’t been all that long since John heard Sherlock play – six months, perhaps. His last visit to the cottage, when Sherlock played outside on the porch, saluting the setting sun with an untamed melody, marching orders for the day to come.

Something has changed, something intangible, something John cannot name.

But as he listens, absorbed in both music and musician, he begins to understand.

Sherlock had laid out a folded map on the table – carefully removing it from its zip-closed plastic bag – and had traced the footpaths of southern England with his finger. John had lined up the postcards and matched them to the towns, and Sherlock animatedly related his finds – lighthouses and shipwrecks, lichen and moss, soot and ash burned into sheltering rocks by people whose bones have long turned to stone. There are terrible secrets even in the smallest of villages, danger on the slippery precipices, mystery buried with rotted timber and knotted pine.

There is a knot in his throat and he chokes on it sitting here, listening to Sherlock, watching him play. Sherlock has changed – is changing before him – as he conquers his restless mind by walking, clearing the way for his music to serve another purpose.

There is another message in the music now, and John does not think he’s imagining it. Sherlock plays to London, his back to John, but John hears the longing in the music, feels it in the very air.

And for a moment, he isn’t the father of a daughter nearly fifteen. He doesn’t have a steady job, a dependable income, and workweek hours. For a moment, a fleeting moment, there’s a chill of cold steel against his back, tucked into the waistband of his jeans, and he’s running, as he hasn’t run in years and years and years. Running for his life, and utterly, utterly at peace.

The moment passes. The taste of it remains.

They drink a bottle of wine and watch a movie – a mystery Sherlock solves before it is fully presented. He eats nuts and cheese and expounds on protein, and John thinks he is an entirely new person in an upgraded wrapper.

Three more years, perhaps four. He can wait – he has to wait.

He hopes Sherlock can, too.

He knows with absolute certainty now, as he watches this new Sherlock, that he could never have survived Rosie’s childhood with Sherlock in London.

How did Sherlock know?

“I’ll walk with you – if you’re still at it – in a few years,” he says as the movie ends and Sherlock takes care to fold up his map and replace it in its waterproof casing.

Sherlock’s hands still. He looks up to meet John’s eyes.

“I’ll hold you to that, you realise,” he says.

“I know,” John answers. “I’m counting on it.”

ooOOOoo

The postcards fill a shoebox.

Sherlock, in these past three and a half years, has walked from one end of Britain to the other. He’s walked wild coasts and sandy shores, pastoral hillsides and windy moors. He’s walked through forests, slept in rooms above noisy pubs in quaint villages, explored castles and ruins, picked his way through forgotten garden mazes.

The postcards tell the story of his journey, how he left to chase distant horizons when his world became too small.

Rarely a week goes by without a card in the post with a line or two of Sherlock’s distinctive cursive. An observation on the locality, perhaps, or a random fact seemingly pulled from the air. Sometimes – rarely – something more personal. Something that almost – but not quite – touches on the why of Sherlock’s journey. A scrap of poetry, a melody unsung.

_Waiting is hard work. -SH_

_I saw you in the village this morning, carrying milk home from the shop. You looked happy, but of course it wasn’t really you. – SH_

_When I feel I don’t fit inside my skin anymore, I sit by the sea and shrink back to proper size. – SH_

John pulls aside those postcards – the half-composed songs, the glimpses of heart and soul, the sound bites that capture Sherlock’s restlessness, his loneliness. He arranges them by date, ties a green ribbon around them, and tucks them in his sock drawer.

He doesn’t really know why.

ooo

The flat is terribly quiet without Rosie.

She wasn’t overly noisy, nor particularly messy, but going from two people to only one in a home is a drastic reduction nonetheless, especially when the one who’s moved out is the one whose friends treated the flat as the local coffee house. It’s only been a week since classes started, two weeks since move-in day, and John can’t abide the emptiness.

He misses her.

They call each other – not every day, but a few times a week. She’s landed in an anthropology class and it’s brilliant, though economics is not. He listens to her voice and imagines her here, but knows, because he’s been through this himself, that she’s where she belongs now. He’ll be here for her as long as he’s breathing – just a phone call, a train ride away.

Edinburgh.

It seemed so very far away when he traced his finger from London north. A five-hour train ride.

How long would that take to walk?

He’s bought shoes without consulting Sherlock, and figures they’ll be judged deficient, but he’s not going to spend a hundred pounds for shoes – he’s just not. He’s not committed to anything definitive. A light backpack for day hikers –a partial commitment, just something to use to test the waters, see how it works over his bad shoulder. He’d upgraded to one with extra padding, and he reads about packing it – heavy items on the bottom – and adjusting the straps.

He buys a water bottle that fits into the side pocket but he has a hard time reaching around to get it out and feels ridiculous doing so. But he’s not buying a pouch and tube – that, too, would speak of a commitment, and he hasn’t even been officially invited. He doesn’t have to be. He knows that. He can give Sherlock a call anytime and suggest an outing. But it feels wrong to do so, to be the one intruding in such personal space. He’s been a voyeur far too long.

He buys a new umbrella, and a lightweight jacket that will keep off the wind.

Three weeks, and he’s holding a postcard. Buckingham Palace.

_Dress appropriately. – SH_

His stomach does an odd flip-flop.

He sits on his chair, a fair replica of the one that burned up all those years ago, then gets directly back up again and makes a pot of tea. Mug in hand, he sits again, and considers his life.

He has a daughter (tucked safely away at uni with her way paid by a trust fund from Sherlock – that had been a nice little surprise a year ago when he’d sprung that on them at Angelo’s). He has a job – a good job, with plenty of demands, a touch of risk and an adequate salary. He has friends. A bit of family. Mrs. Hudson. He has 221B – his home. The only home Rosie has ever known.

He doesn’t know how long he has – though the postcard seems to suggest Sherlock is not too far away.

Nothing permanent.

Auto-pay on the bills. A call to Molly to check up on the flat and on Mrs. Hudson from time to time, and to sort through the post. A note for Mrs. Hudson’s niece – he’ll drop it in the post if things go as he thinks they might.

He’s not sure what to do about his job, so he calls in a family emergency and six weeks’ leave. He’s never used family leave before, and tries not to feel guilty for doing so now. If nothing comes of this, if he’s wrong about Sherlock, he’ll book a trip to Spain and relax on the beach for a week or two. Sort out his life. Move on.

He’s not wrong, though. He can’t be wrong.

He wakes the next morning and takes his time getting ready. He shaves, and worries over his hair, which won’t settle into its usual place. He puts on comfortable jeans, dry-wick socks, a long-sleeved shirt with pockets over a short-sleeved tee and vest. His backpack is packed – there isn’t much in it – a change of clothes, a few pair of socks, first aid kit with plasters of all shapes and sizes, a few hundred pounds he took out the day before and rolled up inside a pill bottle. His meds. Damn the hypertension. He strips down his wallet to the bare essentials and throws the sunscreen and insect repellant into the backpack’s pouch almost as an afterthought.

He still thinks he’s far more equipped than Sherlock.

Nine o’clock and his stomach is churning. He counts the stairs as he walks down to Mrs. Hudson’s – he’s exceedingly careful. A careless trip and he’d be laid up for weeks. Silly. He’s never even stumbled on these stairs – well, yeah. Not stone-cold sober, anyway.

He has tea with Mrs. Hudson while her niece is out doing the shopping, and she looks him over carefully, eyes still sharp in a face as old as his friendship with Sherlock. She smiles her approval, but neither mentions the change in the wind. Instead, she asks about Rosie, and he shares an amusing text or two and tries not to think about how empty her room is, or the spun-glass sun he’s hung in the corner of his own room by the window.

He’s got his feet propped on the table, idly flipping through mindless drivel on the telly, when Sherlock walks through his door.

John smiles when he sees him.

John doesn’t know that he’s missed a spot shaving. That his hair is too long. That his eyes are still the same blue.

He offers Sherlock a drink, but Sherlock is already in the kitchen, refilling his water bottle.

“You walked here.”

Sherlock’s hair is too long. He hasn’t shaved in several days. His eyes are the same startling blue grey green.

“It’s stifling in here,” Sherlock says, and John realises he hasn’t opened a window to the beautiful and clear late summer day.

Sherlock is heading for the door and John follows him out, unwilling to lose sight of him even for a moment. Halfway down the stairs he gets hold of himself. Not like this. This isn’t the message he wants to give Sherlock – a man out for a stroll to Tesco. He’s not even wearing his new shoes.

“Wait for me – I’ll be right out.”

Inside the flat, inside his home, inside 221B, he changes his shoes, stretching his toes in the unfamiliar geography of shoes made for long walks. He folds his jacket inside the backpack, tucking it around a bubble-wrapped package, a lark, a folly. He checks his water, then slings the pack over his shoulder. He stares at his bed – newly made up with fresh sheets – and watches speckles of orange and yellow flames dance across the bedclothes as the morning sun catches the spun glass in the window. He turns away and walks to the kitchen, unplugs the kettle and the toaster, opens the refrigerator and pours the milk down the drain.

The act feels so damn final. He hopes he won’t be running out for more milk come evening.

He glances at the stairs going up to Rosie’s room, and can’t stop his feet from climbing them.

He takes his time to look his fill. The room will be hers as long as she wants it, for weekends and summers, and perhaps there’ll be a grandchild someday.

Or perhaps not. He doesn’t hope or dream. It is what it is. 

When he’s outside at last, Sherlock is lifting a cigarette to his lips. He allows one long, satisfied drag before he calmly takes it away and crushes it against the bricks. Something prickles at his mind, and he glances up at the sky. Cloudy, but it doesn’t feel like rain.

“Umbrella?” He’s left his in the cupboard. He glances back at the door he’s just closed.

Sherlock raises his eyes and shakes his head.

“Alright then.”

They walk away, side by side, down Baker Street.

Conversation is easy when you’re finally on a level playing field. When there’s no one around to overhear, to misinterpret your tone of voice. When the itch in your trigger finger has faded into a bearable ache, and you hardly remember the sound of coat tails flapping in the wind.

At the end of the day, there’s a pub, with fish and chips and a pint for each. There’s a room over the pub with two beds and a shared bath, a window facing west, soft pillows and warm quilts. Two toothbrushes, two pair of reading glasses, two wallets, and a set of keys that John won’t be needing for a very long time.

At the end of the day, it’s just the two of them, for the first time in nearly forever, and Sherlock is worrying over John’s shoes, then rubbing the ache out of his feet.

John thinks Sherlock must think him surprised to be here, but John Watson, in fact, is not surprised at all.

ooOOOoo

Sometimes, after a long day in the A&E, Rosie would rub his feet as they sat together on the sofa watching the telly. He’d press his heels playfully against her leg and wiggle his toes within his socks, and she’d sigh and roll her eyes, but it was only ever a show. She’d rub his tired feet and he’d sigh, and close his eyes, and enjoy the domesticity, and the relief of being off his feet at last.

He’d joked that she should pursue a career in massage therapy - she’d learned the anatomy of the foot by the time she was twelve.

Rosie’s foot massages had felt good.

But this. 

This is something else altogether.

Perhaps it is because he’s walked so many miles today, in shoes not quite broken in. Perhaps it is because Sherlock’s hands are so much bigger than Rosie’s, so much stronger. Perhaps it is because his mind had a single focus – no television, no dinner to make, no plans for the day to come.

But really, it’s all of these things and none of these things.

There are two beds in the small, comfortable room. John has collapsed, barefoot, on one, head sinking in the down pillows. And Sherlock, without a by-your-leave, has settled on the end of the bed, hip against John’s calf. He is rubbing John’s foot and it is nothing at all like Rosie, casually massaging John’s feet as they watch television, fingers on automatic as eyes and mind follow the sound and movement on the screen. A side task, a distraction.

Sherlock, however, works with a purpose.

There is no telly, no casual conversation to fill the quiet. Sherlock works with care, deliberately, shifting on the bed for a better angle until he is facing John from the end of the bed, legs splayed out around John’s, John’s heels in his lap.

“That’s good.” John flexes his foot, sighs as Sherlock’s thumb presses into the arch. He watches Sherlock work, at ease in this most unlikely place, this most unlikely position.

Sherlock’s hand moves to his heel, fingers sliding up to circle his ankle. He squeezes, thumb pressing upward into John’s calf, working against the tension there, learning flesh and skin and muscle and sinew. John relaxes into the touch. He’s walked a million miles to reach this moment, and he savors the deliberate slowness, the hesitation. If he ever imagined this day, ever considered the prelude to stepping together across the line they’d drawn in the sand, he’d have imagined something entirely different. A Sherlockian misunderstanding leading to a frustrated shouting match followed by a not-quite-accidental touch – one brushing against the other as he pushes past to get to the kitchen.

A hand grasps a forearm, tugs him back none-too-gently, whirls him around to face the music.

_Music._

His focus shifts from might-have-beens to here, to now, to Sherlock’s hands on his feet, his legs. Skillful hands that tease out the aches, that run lightly over the skin to soothe away the burn. There is music, faint but persistent, rising up from the street. A busker, perhaps, with a guitar worn and warm, bent over his instrument, sitting cross-legged on the low stone wall below. 

Sherlock raises his chin, hands still on John’s leg. They lock eyes, briefly, just long enough, then Sherlock rises and steps to the widow. He stands there, looking out, looking down, and he is Sherlock at Baker Street, veiled in the window, a step above London, a step ahead of the world.

John blinks away the memory, and Sherlock opens the window.

It is all that is needed.

The music is clear and crisp – classical guitar, each note rising to fill the air in the room, blending with the note that follows and branding their skin with the melody. Sherlock pads back to the bed and folds in beside John. The slow build, the hesitation is replaced by a new directive, propelled by the music.

Oddly, there is no leader.

John rolls onto his side, Sherlock buries his head in the crook of John’s neck and lets out his breath in a sigh, profound and deeply, perfectly sweet. John wraps an arm around his shoulders and works the other into Sherlock’s hair.

And they are hugging each other, holding each other, no space between them for regrets, for words of any kind at all. It is a fierce embrace, tight and possessive. An _at last_ , an _I’m never letting you go_ embrace. 

John has never been this intimate with anyone, has never felt this connected, not in his marriage, not before, not after. He feels the difference before their lips touch, before they undress, while their love is still unspoken. When Sherlock lifts his head at last, lips grazing over the skin of John’s neck, John meets the kiss with heart in hand, breathing in Sherlock, melding into this new reality of an us so long in coming.

It is a fitting end to the first day of the rest of their lives.

The bed is soft but narrow, the men on it stiff and sore from a long day’s walk. They should not be able to move so fluidly, to shift and roll, to fit together so seamlessly after years spent apart, magnets approaching each other with the same pole, attracting and repelling in equal measures.

But today, tonight, they fall easily into this vertical slow dance, moves choreographed by a force they cannot name. Sherlock helps John out of his shirt, pulls his vest over his head and off, and John’s fingers work at Sherlock’s buttons, unbuckle his belt. Sherlock straddles John, knees supporting his weight, one hand beside John’s shoulder, the other entwined with John’s. They move in tandem, working turgid flesh, learning the shape, the length, the texture of the other. Swallowing each other’s moans as Sherlock comes first, strangling a cry, and John follows, and they collapse together, hearts jolted into new rhythms.

And outside the guitar sings, the breeze blows and the universe goes on as if the earth itself did not just shatter into a million pieces of slivered moonlight, as if John Watson and Sherlock Holmes had done this thing a thousand times before, a hundred different ways. As if this act wasn’t new, this deed often done, as if something in the earth hadn’t shifted.

As if nothing in the world has changed.

ooOOOoo

There’s an empty bed in the morning, and a single bare foot outside the cover at the end of the other. Sherlock wakes first, and pulls in his cold foot, blinking against the morning light, thinking of tea.

ooOOOoo

The Isle of Wight is three hours by car and boat, more than a week by foot. There are six more inns along the way, then two nights at Sherlock’s cottage, and a new pair of shoes for John at a shop Sherlock trusts, in the next town over.

There are things to do at the cottage before they get on their way.

Months have passed since last John visited. Months he spent immersed in work and Rosie’s uni preparations. A two-week trip with her best friend’s family to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest. Equipping her dorm room with more furnishings than Buckingham Palace – and he has that on good authority.

The last time he’d been at the cottage, Sherlock had been nursing a sprained ankle, and John had found the kitchen maddenly difficult to navigate, with all the useful kitchen items – plates and bowls and mugs and storage containers – on the highest shelves, appliances hidden in the back of cupboards, and the electric kettle’s cord partially melted.

They’ve stopped in town to purchase the essentials, and John carries his load into the kitchen and sets the bags onto a pristine countertop, noting the new kettle, a shiny toaster and four mugs hanging from hooks below the cabinets. A small wicker basket holds the tea supplies.

It’s clean and new and enough, but not too much. He opens the cabinet beside the refrigerator as Sherlock ducks into the loo. Four plates, four bowls, four glasses, all on the bottom shelf.

He wanders down the passage, past the loo, and peaks into Sherlock’s bedroom. Sherlock has deposited their backpacks on the foot of the bed, atop a folded quilt that John recognizes – a gift from Molly when Sherlock bought the cottage.

There are four pillows on the bed, two on each side, and a second bedside lamp now, which doesn’t match the first. John walks around the bed. He’s always complaining to Sherlock when he visits about the too-firm pillow and the scarcity of power outlets, and somehow, given the state of the kitchen, he’s not surprised to find a power strip beneath the nightstand, a universal charger for his mobile already set up. He eyes the pillows thoughtfully, tests them with his hand. Downy soft, in cases smooth and cool.

There is a lump in his throat already, but it is the tiny office that truly wrenches his heart.

Meant as a second bedroom, it’s a cozy space tucked at the rear of the cottage, with a screened porch off the back. There’s a view of the hives, and Sherlock sits here to watch the bees, playing the violin to lull them to rest on slow summer’s evenings. The porch is always littered with books, and sometimes ashtrays, or the detritus of his latest case. The room itself is the storehouse of his life, his cases, his studies and experiments.

Except now, today, a bed has been fitted in. It took careful rearranging, and some furnishings must be gone, though John can’t pinpoint which exactly. The bedside lamp must have come from an odds and end shop. It’s nautical, brass, intricate, and very old. The power strip beneath the tiny table is new. The quilt on this bed draws his attention – old, worn and comfortable. The periodic table of the elements sewn onto the cloth. He’d never seen it before, but imagines it came from Sherlock’s mum, a relic of his abbreviated childhood.

There is movement behind him, and he turns as Sherlock regards him somewhat helplessly, looking trapped, and expectant, and apologetic.

“It’s alright,” John says. “I’d have left the pillow and blanket out on the sofa too, I think.”

He sees the room for what it is - a back-up plan, a just-in-case. A place for John if they’d come here together, yet still apart.

They don’t need to work out the details of their lives this minute. John still has a job, and a daughter off at uni, and there are bills to pay, and Mrs. Hudson to consider.

And a world of possibilities in a life turned inside out, twice as big now as it was before.

He feels nineteen again, or better yet, thirty-six. In the best shape of his life, with the worst of it behind him, the best of it before him. He has it all. A piece of himself, a child, balanced on the edge of her own tomorrow. A best friend turned lover, who clawed out of hell, suffered through purgatory, and claimed his reward.

John hopes to hell he is worth it.

They’re still standing in the doorway of the office-cum-bedroom, and Sherlock still looks a bit uncertain.

It’s sweet, in a decidedly Sherlock sort of way, and John lets out the breath he’s been holding since London, since Rosie left, since Mary died, since Sherlock came back from the dead.

“So – the Isle of Wight,” he says.

Sherlock, back on familiar ground, perks up.

“Yes,” he says. “Tennyson.”

“Queen Victoria,” John says. “This walking thing – we don’t have to swim there, do we?”

“There’s a hovercraft,” Sherlock says. “Though technically, it’s cheating.”

“Technically,” John answers, letting his gaze wander over the cozy cottage, then returning to look appraisingly at Sherlock. He cannot tamp out the love in his eyes, the invitation in his voice. “Technically, we’ve probably walked far enough.”

The Isle of Wight will be there in a week, or a month, or even a year, when the itch returns, the wanderlust. Decisions can wait a few more days. Even the bees can continue their quests unhindered – it’s not yet time to harvest the honey and prepare for winter.

John steps forward, two paces, in the tiny space. “Rosie can stay here when she visits – we’ll have to clear off the bed because I know you’re going to pile it up with junk.” He is backing Sherlock up against the wall, and everything is absolutely _perfect_ in this backwards life he’s been leading. “We’re keeping 221B. A bit more London will do you some good – you’re getting too much fresh air down here.”

Sherlock’s scoff is utterly forced, but his eyes are shining and his pleased smile is genuine. He’s looking at John like he wants to kiss him, and John steps an impossible step closer, and presses his lips, reverently, possessively, against Sherlock’s neck. They kiss there in the cottage, and time does an about face, and starts its forward trajectory once again.

ooOOOoo

While Sherlock is out in the garden the next morning, John removes the bubble wrap from the package he’s been toting around in his backpack. A spun globe of green and white and blue, suspended on a silver string. He hangs it in front of the bedroom window, where the morning sun catches it, painting the walls in oceans blue, islands green, and clouds of cotton white.

Home, John realises with a start, is where you hang your heart.

He watches the orb spin in the gentle breeze a moment more, then barefoot, plods through the cottage, already too quiet. He plugs in the kettle, refills his tea, and eases himself down on the porch stairs with his mug in his hands.

The salty sea is in the air, the morning sun warm on his face. A dog barks in the distance. He stretches his legs out and watches Sherlock examine a flower, or more likely, the bee that dances upon it.

Sherlock is too far away.

John stands.

Barefoot still, mug in hand, he walks out to join Sherlock in the garden.

Sherlock takes the mug from John’s hand, sips the tea, then presses the mug back to him as John raises his face and kisses Sherlock’s tea-warm mouth.

It is a picture of domesticity he’s never even imagined, the very antithesis of who they once were.

It will do for now.

There will be walks across Scotland, chases through London, trips to the A&E to mend broken bones. They’ll visit Egypt to see the pyramids, and John will have a run-in with a petulant camel. There will be arguments enough, and Sherlock will be prone to pouting. Sex will not always be the tender exploration of those early, exuberant days. John, more apt than Sherlock to be jealous, will be possessive. Sherlock will develop a troublesome desire for intimacy in nontraditional spaces – Lestrade’s office, a cupboard at Bart’s, the backseat of one of Mycroft’s cars.

But for now, today, as they ease into the rest of their lives, Sherlock takes John’s hand and, glancing at his bare feet with a fond smile, leads him away to see the hives.

Fin


End file.
